23 Jan Dealing with Anxiety – Mindfully
(Today’s guest blogger is Tom Pedulla writing to us about the Mindfulness Based Groups he and his colleague Jerome Bass lead in Boston.)
For four years now, my colleague Dr. Jerome Bass and I have been co-facilitating Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) groups for people suffering from depression and anxiety. And we’ve seen many of those people make some amazingly positive changes.
These 8-week groups are based on a groundbreaking program that has been clinically proven to bolster recovery from depression and prevent relapse (and described in the book Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression by Segal, Williams and Teasdale). Participants learn how to use a variety of mindfulness based skills to manage symptoms of depression and anxiety, to bring more acceptance to those symptoms, and to minimize the distress they usually create.
People sometimes ask me if MBCT can also be used effectively by trauma survivors. The answer is, simply put, “It depends.”
If you’re still in the early stages of recovery and could be easily triggered and overwhelmed by the painful thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations that are associated with depression and anxiety (and trauma), and that are often the focus of the mindfulness techniques we teach in the group, then you should probably wait before signing up for MBCT.
But if you’re further along in your recovery, if you’ve already processed a significant amount of your trauma history with a therapist, if you’re feeling fairly stable, and if you’d like to learn some new ways to work with depressive and anxious symptoms that are still causing problems for you, then MBCT could be just the thing you need to keep moving forward.
To learn more, visit our website at http://www.mbctboston.com/.
We generally offer two groups a year: one in the spring and one in the fall. The next is scheduled to begin in late March of 2011. And if you have any questions about whether this group program is appropriate for you, we’d be happy to speak with you and/or meet with you individually to tell you more about it and discuss your concerns.